MASA MEMORIES: ANDREA ALISEDA
Masa Memories is our ongoing series of conversations and stories - celebrating and honoring Family Food Traditions.
Running a part-time Masa Memory pop-up restaurant and catering business, has taught me that there is no such thing as too much planning. Something always comes up and having the right team in the kitchen with me is crucial! There are many beautiful connections made along the way and of course, waves of surprises and challenges as well. Amidst the waves, an organic flow takes over and everything comes together. Movements the body has memorized get the dishes out and hands know how to season the beans. In the background rush of it all, there is pulsing JOY. My favorite part about cooking in LA, is the community we have built and are surrounded by. From our clients to our customers, friends and family, we are always aware of our good fortune when it comes to people!
My Masa Memory crew is a true extension of my family. They support me every step along the way and always show up with a “let’s go” attitude. Everyone on our team is passionate about using local ingredients, mindful cooking that supports the earth and humans, giving life to the origin story of dishes and creating beautiful meals that stem from the heart. These are my kind of people forever and always.
This brings me to how I met Andrea. Andrea and I connected over a mutual love for maíz, explorations of Mexican-American foodways, plant-based recipes and so much more. Cooking with Andrea is like; being by the ocean in spring, when a warm breeze passes by and reminds you summer is just around the corner. There is a strength in her ease.
A writer, cook and a mushroom obsessed vegan taco enthusiast - Andrea is a beautiful soul with so much to share and we are here to listen! I am too lucky and so thankful to have her as part of our Masa Memory team and family. I hope her interview speaks to you the way it has to me. I can feel her openness, humor, grace and generosity in every response.
Love, April
What do Family Food Traditions mean to you?
I’m still trying to figure out what this means to me. For now I can say that family food traditions are a living, constantly evolving connection to you and yours. Whether it be from recipes to restaurants; food traditions have the ability to tether you to people in your family that you’ve never met, to those who are no longer in your life, to those who you don’t see so often, and to those who are part of your every day. These traditions are an organic way of honoring where and who you come from, what that means to you, who you love, and remind you of yourself and who you are. It’s a ceremony of personal culture and history no matter how big or small or new or old or whole or broken, and it feeds your soul like nothing else.
“Food traditions have the ability to tether you to people in your family that you’ve never met, to those who are no longer in your life, to those who you don’t see so often and to those who are part of your every day.”
What is the first memory that comes to mind when you think of home-cooked food?
Plant-based dish by Andrea
The first memory that comes to mind is a recent one. I was in New York and staying at my friend’s place in Brooklyn, and I had woken up hungover and feeling a little anxious on what was a rainy day. My friend Melissa, who is an excellent cook, had asked what I wanted to eat and I told her I was craving soup. She went out for a beautiful round loaf of sourdough bread from Saraghina’s in Bed Stuy and came back with a long iris flower and a bottle of orange wine too. With two cans of white beans and a veggie broth she made the most comforting delicately flavored soup. I can be kind of a brute in the kitchen, opting at times for bolder flavors, so watching her cook gingerly and gently served as a nice reminder that time makes simple ingredients really shine. Melissa served the soup with a pesto composed of the herbs she had in her fridge and slices of toasted bread - we chilled and popped on ‘Sex Education’. It was exactly what I needed at the moment and I felt so taken care of. And the soup was so so good, that I’ve already tried remaking it twice at home. I love beans so much, it’s going to be a new staple in my rotation.
“When I moved to New York was the first time I realized how much Mexican food and culture mattered to me. I had always taken it for granted having it around me all the time - the fruterias, the taco shops, the closeness to Tijuana. Leaving my hometown helped me understand that culture is a vital part of survival, and a critical component of happiness to our humanity.”
What does the correlation between heritage and cooking mean to you?
When I moved to New York was the first time I realized how much Mexican food and culture mattered to me. I had always taken it for granted having it around me all the time––the fruterias, the taco shops, the closeness to Tijuana. Leaving my hometown helped me understand that culture is a vital part of survival, and a critical component of happiness to our humanity. I reconnected to my culture in a profound way in a new city, across the country, during a time when my health wasn’t so great physically and emotionally and it was a really big moment for me. At some point I realized my culture was missing, and I wasn’t whole without it. So, I started learning to make more traditional dishes at home, looking for good tortillas––which turned out to be a challenge! I bought ‘Decolonize your Diet’, and it was extremely pivotal. Through it I realized that culture is healing, and learned what decolonization meant, why it’s an important framework to view culture, tradition and food through.
There’s something just undeniably special about cooking meals that you ate with your family, that they ate with theirs and so on, or that are just inherent to your culture, even if it’s in a different context. The lineage of ingredients, recipes, and traditions. . . being able to bring them to life in your home and in your kitchen to create something you can feel with all your senses, speaks volumes to the kind of magic cooking can conjure. It’s soul food and it can be extremely healing. It literally resurrected me and gave me purpose. The connection between food and culture, that stemmed from this experience alone, has immensely shaped and inspired my writing.
What is your favorite plant-based substitutions for meat centered dishes within Mexican cooking? What has been the biggest challenge when creating new recipes as a plant-based chef?
Chilaquiles de Mole recipe by Andrea
I don’t consider myself a chef, though it is always flattering to be called that. I’m a home-cook who loves to eat, create recipes, and feed people and make them happy. My absolute favorite meat substitution is mushrooms, hands-down. They’re so easy to be flavored the way meat has been, and certain cooking methods used for animal meat like pulling, searing, marinating etc really translate. There are so many different kinds that run a gamut of flavor and texture perfect
for so many types of dishes and desired results. I love pulling oysters, squishing maitakes, searing or breading lion’s manes. It’s really a practice in radical love and acceptance of their differences and tuning in to how to cook them to their unique specifications, and bringing out their best. Mushrooms are such a gift to cooks and eaters alike, I could spend a lifetime trying to eat them all and no two would be the exact same.
My biggest challenge in creating new recipes has been staying true to my memories of flavor. It’s been so long since I’ve had carne asada, for example, that I really have to tune in to a rolodex of flavor memories that are faded and not crisply present in the tip of my mind, but it’s also where the fun of it is for me. I really enjoy bridging those gaps from memory to flavor and playing around with different methods. I also think there’s at times a certain pressure to be traditional or “authentic” and for things to be near exact approximations. But in the same breath, I think being vegan has made it so that there’s wiggle room with how you explore iterations of dishes. Vegan-Mexican food is its own cuisine and should be acknowledged as such. It feels like I’m part of a new tradition that takes from historical and Indigenous plant-based eating in Mexico while also exploring memories of regional dishes that once included meat or dairy in a new context, living in the U.S., having access to different produce and having both coexist in a way that’s harmonious.
Andrea with her mom and tita (grandmother)
Who taught/has had the largest impact on the fundamentals of cooking that you use to this day?
Both my parents didn’t really know how to cook, with my dad’s exception of carne asada (so patriarchal!), and my mom figured it out along the way through friends and recipe books and magazines. Her fundamentals are along the lines of, “fuck fundamentals and figure it out” and it’s something I carry with me. I feel it has allowed me to explore cooking with freedom and instinct, while throwing Eurocentric ideas of cooking to the wind; giving myself permission to be guided by my imagination and senses.
My cooking has also been shaped by my partner, Marcel–––an incredible cook–––who first taught me to make spaghetti at 17. He’s been cooking for a long long time, learned from his parents who are also great cooks, and his guidance in the kitchen has been imperative to my growth in the kitchen. His knack for knowing what something needs just astonishes me every time, he’s so dialed in with balancing flavors. His palate is really remarkable.
Garbanzo Aguachile recipe by Andrea - inspired by her time working at TJ Oyster Bar
What made you transition into a plant-based lifestyle? How has plant-based cooking influenced other aspects of the way you live travel?
I was a sixteen year-old with inclinations to be vegetarian since I was about 10 or 11, and had been struggling with an eating disorder for many years when I first stopped eating animal products. I had come across a book called ‘Skinny Bitch’ to as the name suggests, get “skinny.” But what I read completely changed the way I viewed meat and dairy consumption instead. The book should really be called ‘Sneaky Bitch’. Ha! I joke, but it awakened my young mind to animal factory farming in a way that really shook me. I finally had the “why” hardwired and it made it easy to finally jump into vegetarianism. The book changed my life and, indirectly, my relationship to eating. It freed me in a way, and eating sans meat helped heal my relationship to food––even if it’s still a life-long journey with periodical set-backs. It stopped being about counting calories and just became a thing of embracing whole foods. There was more ease in it.
I was vegan at first, but it was too hard as a high-schooler to afford and keep up with all the replacements I thought I needed, and also I lacked the knowledge and imagination that is so accessible these days, so I went vegetarian. My mom didn’t understand, and she’s barely coming around, but, at the time she said I’d have to cook for myself, “no es restaurant!” As a single mom, I don’t blame her. So I started to learn to cook, burning lots of pots and pans along the way, making rice, mushrooms and zucchini as a staple, and eating my mom’s beans when she didn’t add Consomé (chicken bouillon). I was vegetarian for about six or seven years, broke it when I worked at a farm-to-table restaurant to try the many things I thought I was missing out on, and officially went vegan again five years ago when my partner and I got our pup, Blue.
Adopting a vegan diet changed everything for me. It was in a period of my life when I was really learning about gastronomy, and what it meant to eat gourmet. I think there’s a misconception there that implies eating well or distinguished means eating all kinds of “rare” meats and organs. But veganism forced me to look at gastronomy through a different lens, and opened me up to all the plant-based foods that have existed for centuries, it's a world that I’ve since been extremely taken by. I love eating fruits, vegetables, fungi, flowers and herbs and learning to cook with them. There’s so much culture and history there for me to explore, so much still to learn about, it’s a world that continues to unfold for me.
Since, I’ve been keen on understanding foodways, where my produce is coming from, its history and cultural context (my favorite bits to dig into, and where my work lies), and who grows and sells it. There’s so much beyond just veganism there to understand, things I’m still learning about in terms of making better daily choices for a more holistic planet that go beyond abstaining from eating animal products, like labor practices and the impact of big agriculture for example. I don’t think veganism is the finite solution I once thought it was, but I still think some approximation to it for people that it makes sense to is a great starting point. I’d really like to see factory farming be abolished in my lifetime.
These days I’d say that locavorism is my aspiration, and I’d really love to learn to forage (and not die, ha!). I feel like seasonal/local eating is the direction veganism needs to embrace too. It’s been the way people have eaten for so long, and just such a connected way to enjoy the earth’s bounty––by geographical location. Big agriculture has made it so we’re less in sync with the earth, ways of growing food, of the many varieties of foods like beans and maíz and vegetables that we don’t get to know because there’s only the chosen few in supermarkets. Alicia Kennedy writes about eating meatless and local, and its many intersections in much more depth and so much better than I could ever explain, so if you’re reading this, read her work!
I also just feel best when I can eat seasonally and locally, it’s always an event to visit my farmers market nearby. It genuinely does wonders for my mental and emotional health to sensorially take it in, it injects happiness and pleasure into my life. And I love meeting the people who grow the food I’m buying, it makes me feel good about what I’m eating.